The long road home for lost relics

During the reign of Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) Emperor Qianlong in the 18th century, he commissioned Chinese and Western court painters to portray distinguished generals who had taken part in several major battles, honoring officers who had contributed to national unification. Over time, hundreds of these official portraits were produced.

Between 1900 and 1901, when the Eight-Nation Alliance invaded Beijing during the Boxer Rebellion, these portraits were looted and scattered overseas. Many are now held in overseas museums. Among them, 29 pieces are held in seven German museums. The original home of the portraits, the Forbidden City — today's Palace Museum — holds only two copies.

For more than half a century, because the portraits were missing, these works were completely forgotten. It was not until 1985 that Nie Chongzheng, a scholar at the Palace Museum, discovered the group of works while in Germany, according to Yuan Hong, deputy director of the Foreign Affairs Office of the Palace Museum. The museum is currently working with seven German counterparts on a project to trace cultural relics looted during the Boxer Rebellion that are now part of the German museums' collections.

Yuan said that this Sino-German project focuses on the large-scale loss of the portraits in 1901. Because there are relatively detailed Qing Dynasty archives for this group of official paintings, the joint Chinese-German provenance research has been made easier. "Provenance research is a time-consuming and labor-intensive process, but cooperative work of this kind also provides academic support for future returns," said Yuan.